After spending 2024 touring with Kim Gordon, and Machinedrum, Crimewave, aka Jake Wilkinson, has stepped out on his own. Created with Rainy Miller, another figure in the Northern wave of experimentalists, debut album Scenes shakes down the mythology of club culture, strips away its glamour and drags it by the hair through Manchester’s criminal back alleys. Each track bleeds into the next through short interludes and BPM shifts mirroring the stumble and shove of a relentless night out on the town.
The first shocker is that there’s not a single synth to be found here. Just guitar. Wilkinson treats it as a modular instrument, bending sounds until they turn alien and corrupt. Distortion and voltage are his building materials, not power chords and hooks. The result is just as raw and metallic as you’d expect but, weirdly, viscerally beautiful. Like being on your knees, staring into a neon-lit pool of sick at 3 a.m.
Crimewave’s volatility feels inseparable from Manchester nightlife itself, a place where heritage and progress are uneasy bedfellows. Emerging from the city’s tight-knit live electronic scene, Crimewave sits within a wave of artists like Silverwingkiller and Another; Country $$$$ steadily reframing dance music. While dropping the clinical, clean lines of electronica, Scenes is cold and forensic in a different way. Wilkinson digs into the seedy, criminal side of nightlife and in doing so, taps a seam of innovation that runs from the industrial grind of early Factory Records, through the baggy, narcotic haze of the 1990s Hacienda, to the visceral noise-punk hybrids of contemporary acts like Mandy, Indiana.
The 40-second opener, ‘ID’, is a disorienting and functional segue into the album’s world. We join the anxious throng of a city’s club goers gathering in before the chaos starts. Single, ‘White Label’, leads off with an urgency of clipped breaks and a voice repeating “I don’t know what I saw.” We descend rapidly into the queasy rush and push of a night that’s already gone sideways. From there, there is no let up.
The more substantial tracks give Scenes its structure, but even these dissolve and wash into each other. ‘Misdemeanour’ churns and booms like a broken laundrette machine and ‘Haemoglobin’ scratches and fidgets in a sticky panic, drenched in reverb and sweat. Elsewhere, ‘Semaphore’ and ‘Damage Control’ offer greater precision and clarity, this time with heaving, breathless rhythms driving their sense of unease. Later,‘Torrent’ is ballad-like by comparison, paying loved-up reverence to the club lights. A fleeting lucid moment drops us suddenly into ‘Antagonist’ like a bad trip. Refracted voices and crystal shards collapse into a blur of movement and noise, where any discernible melody is quickly gobbled like the last slivers of kebab meat.
At its best, Scenes rewires club music’s boringly predictable repetitive machinery. ‘Intolerance’ and ‘Instrumentals’ serve as a neat closing summary of everything great about this album. Where most club records aim for the sweet drop and the flash of euphoria that sends a crowd skyward, Wilkinson flattens it with continuity and realism. He doesn’t pretend you won’t get your phone pinched, or your drink spiked, or fight over the last taxi. Most nights never peak and Crimewave captures what the post-lockdown, expensive, CCTV-surveilled club landscape feels like now: anxiously still chasing a high, but ultimately more aware of its own absurd theatre.
‘Scenes’ is released on 7th November via Fools Gold
